Circuits; If Leonardo Had Made Toys

By MICHEL MARRIOTT

Published: February 8, 2007

LEONARDO DA VINCI'S 15th-century vision of mechanical flight apparently never included fixed wings assisted by propellers or jet engines. His chief inspiration was birds, reflected in drawings of a flying machine fashioned to stay aloft by flapping its wings.

More than 500 years later, WowWee, a robotics and entertainment products company, shares that vision. Next month, it plans to release a mass-produced, functional ornithopter, a device that flies in birdlike fashion -- in this case, a radio-controlled toy that mechanically flaps its Mylar wings.

The inspiration -- besides Leonardo's work -- is an insect, said Sean Frawley, the 22-year-old inventor of the toy, the FlyTech Dragonfly.

''People have been experimenting all around the world with these kinds of things,'' Mr. Frawley, an aerospace engineering graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., and project manager for WowWee, said in a telephone interview from the company's office in Hong Kong.

During demonstration flights of the Dragonfly last month at the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual technology showcase in Las Vegas, the fluttering, footlong bug was an enormous hit. Throngs of onlookers clamored for a chance to buy the $50 toy on the spot. At the time, none were for sale.

The robotic Dragonfly will take flight again at the American International Toy Fair, the largest toy trade show in the Western Hemisphere, which begins Sunday in New York. But it will hardly be alone there in its use of technologies that are giving a new generation of toys extraordinary capabilities to fly, float, walk and roll -- almost always inexpensively -- in ways unimaginable just a few years ago.

''Is there a revolution?'' asked Gene Khasminsky, the design director for Interactive Toy Concepts, the Canadian maker of the Micro Mosquito, a palm-size, radio-controlled helicopter that was in demand among holiday shoppers at about $70.

''I think, right now, that there is a push back from our industry to get kids off the couch where they're playing video games,'' Mr. Khasminsky said in a telephone interview from his office in Toronto. ''We're moving into an age where toys are becoming more high-tech to stay competitive with gaming.''

He suggested that navigating well-designed vehicles in the physical world -- like the company's inventory of remote-controlled helicopters, planes and helium blimps -- is vastly more compelling than steering a virtual vehicle in a computer-generated universe.

Executives at Mattel, which owns Tyco, are placing their bets on a new kind of radio-controlled three-wheeled vehicle it is calling the Tyco R/C Terrainiac. Scheduled to go on sale in the summer for about $80, the Terrainiac is a futuristic-looking vehicle powered by a single rear wheel that is a complex treaded ball, referred to by its makers as a ''sphere drive.''

The body of the vehicle has been engineered with a controllable joint that allows the Terrainiac to pivot or twist like a human torso. The results are radical turns at high speeds as its high-torque electric motor drives the vehicle over practically any sort of terrain; thus its name.

But George Benz, director of marketing for Tyco Radio Control, said the toy will not be limited to solid surfaces. The sphere drive is hollow, helping to provide buoyancy as well as locomotion when the Terrainiac takes to the water.

''The tricky part of development is making these toys have tremendous performance on land and really deliver when it gets wet,'' he said.

WowWee, whose previous creations include the robotic toy Robosapien, is also working on a radio-controlled vehicle for release this year that walks on four spidery, multijointed legs. It is called Roboquad and is expected to cost $100.

And Wild Planet Entertainment, which makes a line of ''spy toys for any mission'' under the rubric Spy Gear, had added a surveillance wrinkle to a rather conventional remote-controlled vehicle. Its Spy Video Car, which sells for $140, has a front-mounted camera that wirelessly transmits a live video image that can be viewed in an eyepiece.

''A separate transmitter in the car transmits the video over a 2.4 megahertz frequency like a wireless phone uses,'' said Shannon Bruzelius, the product integrity engineer at Wild Planet, which operates research and development centers in San Francisco and Hong Kong.

He said the company plans to add a $15 Mobile Spy Ear vehicle (not remotely controlled) equipped with a microphone and an amplifier that can wirelessly beam sounds up to 75 feet to an earbud the user wears.

But of all the innovations brimming in toy vehicles these days, the most startling have been reserved for those that achieve flight.

Late last year, Jakks Pacific, a toymaker in Malibu, Calif., released a lightweight radio-controlled flying wing called the XPV, or Xtreme Performance Vehicle, which sells for $60. Once its onboard battery is fully charged, the twin-propeller craft can soar as high as a 20-story building.

''As technology progresses, the performance of the electronics improves so much that, in a sense, you get more horsepower,'' Michael Bernstein, vice president for boys marketing at Jakks Pacific, said in a telephone interview this week.

That ''horsepower,'' Mr. Bernstein said, is getting cheaper, freeing designers to reach higher and enabling toymakers to deliver more affordable mass-market products -- more RadioShack than Sharper Image. The company plans to unveil more high-performance vehicles under the XPV banner at the toy fair.

Radio-controlled flight was long the expensive purview of hobbyists and model-making enthusiasts, Mr. Khasminsky of Interactive Toy Concepts said. But microelectric motors have become plentiful and relatively inexpensive.

Economies of scale are making once-exotic materials like sturdy and lightweight carbon-fiber cheaper, and newer materials, like EPP foam (expanded polypropylene, which looks and feels like a more resilient Styrofoam) are available, helping achieve sustained flight.

HobbyTron.com, based in Orem, Utah, makes a 6-inch-long, $40 infrared-controlled helicopter, the Picco Z, in which its entire body is made from EPP foam.

At the same time, microprocessors continue to integrate more functions onto single chips, increasing their overall computing power while the chips become lighter and cheaper, toymakers say.

Caleb Chung, the inventor of the 1990s toy hit Furby and a co-founder of Ugobe, a builder of lifelike robotic creatures, said: ''The price of processing power has dropped to the floor. I can buy the equivalent of an Apple II processor for a dime.''

At such prices, Mr. Chung said he can use cheaper motors in his Pleo baby dinosaur because he is confident that the $300 robotic reptile's processors will help regulate those motors to ensure smooth, organic and even ''emotive'' movements when it is released this summer.

But one of the greatest boons to flight has been new battery technology, said Mr. Frawley, the Dragonfly creator. He said lithium-polymer batteries, the same malleable lightweight rechargeable power source in Apple's iPod Nano, had freed flying toys from heavy, bulky batteries and their metal cases.

Mr. Frawley said the lithium-polymer battery in his Dragonfly weighs no more than a penny and can deliver up to 10 minutes of flight after about a 20-minute charge.

Yet he noted that the Dragonfly's predecessor, a kit he designed and sold as a teenager along with a friend, was more energy-efficient.

It was powered by rubber bands.

Photos: A few examples of toys that fly and perform in ways unimaginable just a few years ago, clockwise from above left: the XPV, or Xtreme Performance Vehicle, from Jakks Pacific; the Spy Video Car, from Wild Planet Entertainment; the FlyTech Dragonfly, from WowWee; and the Picco Z, from HobbyTron.com. (Photographs by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)